K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

vlc, ncurses and the framebuffer … ?

I have been using mplayer for years, and I find it handles most everything I require. However, I was enamored by vlc‘s ncurses interface a month ago, when I discovered it.

I’d love to use the same thing for video or audio playback at the framebuffer level, and I have seen pages elsewhere on the Internet that suggest it is possible. The problem is really, that my attempts to build vlc with no requirements outside of ncurses and framebuffer output (kind of like I did for mplayer) … well, they’re tedious.

I tried twice already to wade through the configuration options in a vanilla vlc tarball, but there are quite a few, and I am in very unfamiliar territory. The few I tried crashed for missing dependencies, and add the fact that I am doing all this at 550Mhz, and maybe you can see why this is a bit slow.

I have put this on my to-do list for when I find a faster, more powerful machine, but it might be a ways into the future. If you have any suggestions or if you know the proper flags to use when building vlc, please feel free to coach me. It would be greatly appreciated.

P.S.: I’ve seen the AUR package for vlc-nogui, which I used as a starting point. But I would prefer not depend on a lot of those things — like hal or sdl-image — if I can avoid them.

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3 thoughts on “vlc, ncurses and the framebuffer … ?”

I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I have tried wathing video with vlc in the framebuffer on a 600 Mhz machine. To be honest, I don’t remember whether I couldn’t play a video or whether the playback was laggy, but anyway the console version of vlc gave me a bad impression. I was pleasantly surprised by mplayer after that and have never looked back.

On the other hand I know you are tinkering for the sake of tinkering, so go on ;)